As New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos volunteered in the Masbia soup kitchen on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn yesterday, he reminisced about having once smuggled religious items and medical supplies to Refuseniks in the Former Soviet Union. With Jewish terminology like “shul” easily tripping off his tongue, the Senator joked with…
Lenin, his sister said, “always thought highly of the Jews” — and with good reason, since he apparently had Jewish ancestry. That, at least, is the claim being put forward at a recently opened exhibit at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, where the founding ruler of the Soviet Union is revealed to have had…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. It is said that a good firefighter arrives at the scene half an hour before the fire breaks out. So what about a good photojournalist? When the amateur German aviator Mathias Rust infiltrated the Soviet Union in 1987 and landed right in the middle of Red Square,…
If you are Russian, then you know implicitly that, much like the proverbial tree in the forest, a meal didn’t actually happen unless soup was involved. Or, in my grandmother’s words, if we didn’t eat our soup, our kishki (intestines) would dry up. Consequently, I have spent a lot of my life eating soup. Like…
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye. There is a story in my family about my paternal great-grandfather Yosl (Yeysef), who served as a clarinetist in the Russian Army military band. During World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was held in Germany until a year after the war…
Although it may seem odd to hear a man who drew caricatures for a living talk about what it felt like to live through the horrors of the former Soviet Union, this is exactly what happens in the documentary “Stalin Thought of You.” Meet Boris Efimovich Efimov, a political cartoonist who witnessed every major event…
A longer version of this post appeared in Yiddish. Some weeks ago, on December 12, I was involved in a commemoration at YIVO of the 120th birthday anniversary of the great Yiddish actor and director Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels. I am not sure if Mikhoels is well known among the younger generation in Russia, or anywhere…
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